


Keep Your Head Down (Make No Sound)

by hooksandheroics



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Superheroes/Superpowers, F/M, Secret Identity
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-17
Updated: 2016-02-17
Packaged: 2018-05-21 05:24:50
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,300
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6039906
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hooksandheroics/pseuds/hooksandheroics
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Clarke accidentally sees Arcadia’s neighborhood superhero changing in a telephone booth and doesn’t know what to do with the knowledge. (Written for BSV 2016)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Keep Your Head Down (Make No Sound)

**Author's Note:**

> (written for ph0t0graphs-and-mem0ries on tumblr for bellarke secret valentines 2016)

Clarke can account to being invisible through all of high school – being the daughter of the principal and being forced into a social circle with the rich kids guaranteed a whole four years of being shunned and judged by the majority of the student population.

But she’s weirdly alright with all of that. Wells wasn’t, but that’s just him.

Anyway. The point is that Clarke is now twenty-five, with a job as an illustrator for children’s books and she wears the most outrageous things whenever she goes outside (today, she felt like she needed a little green and pink with a smidgen of black, and people have stopped and stared as she walked past them on the streets – she knows just how eye-catching her wardrobe choices are), so it’s a little annoying and majorly amusing when after her 3 PM meeting and on her way home, she sees this dark-haired man enter an old telephone box in his respectable white shirt and tie, and then comes out as freaking _Gladiatus_ and runs so fast she thinks she’s seen a rip in the time-space continuum in his wake.

First things first: a telephone box? Clark Kent would be mad at this blatant rip off.

Clarke thinks it could just be some kind of costume – a stripper who’s late for his stripping job. There might be some bachelorettes requesting for Arcadia’s neighborhood superhero to strip for them, that’s a kink that’s totally acceptable, in Clarke’s books.

But then again – superhuman speed, both at running and at changing clothes. She would _pay_ for anyone to teach her how to change clothes that quickly. She could get in touch with this person impersonating _Gladiatus_ for lessons.

Anyway, Clarke’s initial plan was to just walk past the telephone booth and ignore everything that has happened because it would be _ridiculous_ if she truly accidentally just saw a superhero change into his costume to save a kitten or help an old lady cross the street. But then she’s directly in front of the open door of the booth, staring at the neatly folded shirt and slacks, and a little black tie hanging on the door knob and she’s – she doesn’t do anything about his clothes, but she files this memory in her “guess if I’m telling the truth or completely fucking with you” anecdotes to tell her friends later, and goes home.

She doesn’t completely forget about it, but at ten in the evening, she’s at the local bar with her friends and on her way to being drunk. At one point, she relays the weird _Gladiatus_ incident to Monty, Raven, and Wells, and only one of them believed her.

“Is he hot?” Raven asks, her eyebrows wiggling as she drinks her pale ale. Her bad leg is propped up on Wells’ lap with his hands resting on it. All friendly, borderline domestic, touching.

Clarke thinks about it, and now that she has the chance to do so, she quickly finds out that she has _seen_ his face and can maybe describe it to a cartographic sketcher and find out who he is, or maybe sketch his face herself. But she would never. Because she’s a good person. “Yes,” she replies.

“Stripper,” Raven and Wells both say at the same time. Clarke looks at Monty for backup. Monty always has her back.

“ _Gladiatus_ could really just be hot, you know,” he says, and Clarke throws him a grateful look. “Superheroes are allowed to be hot.”

“See – thank you!”

“You should have stolen his shirt or something, I could run a DNA test, find out who he is,” Raven offers. “And then maybe you can bang him.”

Clarke snorts. “That’s creepy. And besides, he’s doing this town a favor by using his powers for good. The least I can do is not steal his clothing.”

“I think we can all infer here that what I’m trying to say is that you need to get laid,” says Raven, pointing her glass at Clarke, the contents sloshing around haphazardly. She’s on her way to being drunk, and Clarke is glad that Wells is staying sober for this whole thing.

“No,” Monty replies, setting Raven’s glass down on the table. “I think you just want to find out his secret identity.”

“True, but also this is for Clarke’s sex life.”

Wells cringes, Monty shoots her an apologetic look. Clarke shrugs and gets up. “I’m gonna go to the bathroom, don’t let Raven follow me.”

In all honesty, being a human allows her to think of sketching _Gladiatus’_ face just for aesthetics. He has a really nice face, very cute head of curls. She could just keep the drawing, never let anyone know about it. She can be secretly smug for the rest of her life knowing that she has seen a superhero’s face.

But then she exits the bathroom and finds herself staring at a man at the bar who looks _exactly_ like _Gladiatus_. The shirt, the tie, the _hair_.

This is ridiculous – could God really be playing her right now or is this a hallucination? She drank exactly one and a half bottles of beer, she could not possibly be drunk enough for that.

Next thing she knows, she’s sitting on the open stool next to him, going, “A telephone booth? Really? How original.”

He looks up in alarm. She can give him credit for being quick at connecting things already. “You’re – you –

“I saw you,” Clarke says, giving him her best unimpressed stare. “And I’m kinda disappointed you didn’t _see me_.”

His eyes widen, panic written all over his face. For someone who should be doing his damnedest to hide his secret, he’s not doing a very good job at keeping a poker face. “You were there?”

“Ha, no. I sent my drone to spy on you – of course I was there. You didn’t even look around to check if there were people. You just – _zoom_!” she completes it with a flail of her arm in front of his face.

He really has a nice face, her memory never failed her. And now that she’s up close, she could see the smattering of freckles on his face, like constellations. His skin is darker than hers, eyes brown and warm and he’s very _built_. As superheroes should.

“I was – look,” he sits straight on his stool and turns to face her, voice low and gravelly. She’s heard that voice so many times on the radio and on the TV, on interviews, and she has always thought he was using some kind of voice changing device. Now she’s pretty sure he wasn’t. “I was tired as fuck, there were three separate heists this week, and this afternoon, there was a fire in an apartment building just when I thought I would have the time to finally make the lesson plans I was putting off. I’m sorry I overlooked a passerby.”

Clarke’s eyebrows must be so high up her forehead that he sighs and slumps on the stool tiredly. “I teach history at the local high school. You might as well know that since you’ve already seen my face.”

“Well, my name’s Clarke Griffin, I’m an illustrator for children’s books, and I’m not a superhero but I can keep a secret pretty well. Unlike others.” She gives him a teasing smile, and he seems to relax. He does look tired, with the bags under his eyes, and his tense shoulders.

“Nice meeting you, Clarke,” he says, returns her smile, with a glint in his eyes that could only be curiosity. “My name is Bellamy Blake, full-time teacher, part-time spandex-wearing man who can lift cars and run really fast.”

Clarke laughs – she has never thought of it that way before and now she finds it so ridiculous that her laugh turns into a cackle. He laughs himself and seems to have resigned to having another person who knows about this secret identity. As far as strange meetings go, this by far is the best one Clarke has ever had.

“So,” she says, and his head tilts in curiosity. Like a cat, she thinks. It’s adorable. “How about I buy you a drink?”

He frowns. “I’m not a fun drinking buddy, I must warn you. I can’t get intoxicated, part of my superhuman abilities.”

She thinks this over, and then with a bout of surprise bravado, she says, “How about dinner instead? You can threaten me to keep your secret or _else_ , and never finish that sentence to instill fear. Do superheroes eat?”

He grins at her amusedly. “Yeah, we do. Tomorrow night?”

*

She doesn’t tell any of her friends yet that she’s dating _Gladiatus_ , but she does tell them about dating history teacher Bellamy Blake. Raven yells ‘boo’ at the top of her lungs at the bar, and Clarke just shrugs. She introduces him to her friends, and Raven resigns to a quiet ‘ooh’ instead.

What her friends don’t know wouldn’t kill them.

Besides, she gets to have him pin her against the inside of her apartment door on their third date and kiss her senseless, until her toes curl, and her breath becomes short and quick – because he chose to just kiss and tease her for the first two, and she’s only patient enough to wait until the third before she jumps him.

And she gets to have him read to her his boring textbooks until she gets so _bored_ that she falls asleep in the middle of his retelling of the Crusades.

She doesn’t enjoy when he leaves in the middle of the night with a kiss on her forehead and a promise to come back after whatever superhero stuff he has to do, but she does love it when he swoops in from the window (because he either always has a flare for dramatics or doesn’t know how doors work) and embraces her from behind in the morning, kisses her neck until she’s accepted that this is their lives now.

It’s one day in the middle of March, after a year of dating, that he attacks her on the couch with kisses, deep and long and happy, and she’s not complaining but he has always reserved these kisses for when they’re in the bedroom.

It has been a year and she’s pretty sure she’s finally adjusting to dating a superhero, with the fucked up sleep schedule, and the careful secret identity, and the threat to both of their lives. She’s pretty sure she’s handling this well. She can come home to him passed out on the couch with his wounds slowly healing and not panic as much as she had done the first time it happened. Still, if she were given a chance to be selfish just for once without having consequences, she would wish for Bellamy to never risk his life ever again. But that’s not possible.

But then he’s on top of her, his hands skimming down her sides to rest on her waist, hips slotted perfectly, and his tongue tracing the seam of her lips until she opens up for him – he’s happy, and it’s making her happy, too.

He pulls away and smiles down at her, fond and _in love_. They have not said the words yet, and she could live her whole life not hearing them as long as he’s there to show it. “What’s gotten into you?” she asks, her hands cradling his face, thumb tracing his smile.

He kisses her finger and smiles, wide. “I’m resigning.”

“What – teaching? I always thought you were an eighty-year old man on the inside, never thought it was real. Is this a superhuman thing? Do you age abnormally fast, too?”

He chuckles and rests his head on her collarbone, breath warm on her skin. “No, I meant with the superhero thing.”

She freezes under him and he lifts his head in alarm. His eyes went from happy to worried real fast. “Is – are you okay?”

“Why?” she asks, voice shaky and weak. Her thoughts have halted processing, and she wills them to continue because this is _something else_.

He looks shy, sheepish even, and averts his gaze. He sits up and she does, too. “I wanted to – you always worry whenever I leave in the middle of the night. You never say it, but your forehead does that thing with the wrinkle in the middle of your eyebrows and I – “ he exhales and runs a hand through his hair, a nervous tick. “There was that one night, you were drunk and tired and I tucked you in. I had to leave but you grabbed my hand and held on to it. You said – you said you love me, wished I wasn’t a superhero so that you can have kids with me, a family. And some other things about my abs and my face,” he chuckles and meets her eyes again, this time soft and loving. “I realized that I can’t do any of those things if I’m – if I continue with this. I love you, and I want to have those things with you, too. So I resigned and I’m sticking to being a boring old teacher. If that’s – if that’s okay with you.”

She doesn’t find her voice until he grabs her hand and kisses the back of it with pleading eyes. “But Arcadia –

“Has a lot of other superheroes,” he says, as if he was just waiting for her to ask. “And I’m staying with you from now on.”

She nods. “Okay.”

His eyes widen, and he grins, happy and relieved. “Okay?”

“Yeah, I love you.”

He kisses her again, and if she reveals to her friends at her wedding day that she’s actually dating _Gladiatus_ and they were outraged, she doesn’t care. The important part is that Bellamy Blake is staying with her.

**Author's Note:**

> Hope you enjoyed! Leave a comment below or come yell at me on [tumblr](http://hooksandheroics.tumblr.com)!


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